1.5 Authorize The Feedback Loop Process

At this point, the team within the local authority considering a feedback loop process should have a clear sense of:

• The process or problem they hope to use feedback for
• The existing mechanisms for outreach and dialogue with the public
• The context in which the process will occur, especially who in the local authority will receive feedback and where it will fit into decision-making processes

Equipped with this information, local leadership can decide whether to formally authorize the process. Formal authorization ensures the budget for staff time and material costs is allowable, empowers the feedback loop team, and prepares the local authority to receive and act on the feedback regarding budgets, development planning or service delivery. Further, formal authorization may be necessary to allow the feedback team to leverage the local authority’s communication channels and administrative resources to organize a response or to collect and store public information on government computers and servers (see the discussion of data governance frameworks in Step 4).

Depending on the legal-institutional context of the local authority, examples of authorizations include: an executive decree or order from the mayor’s office; memorandum of understanding between the local authority and civil society organizations (CSOs) helping to implement the feedback process; a local council resolution, an administrative order, or a memorandum assigning staff to the task.

However, there are exceptions: If the process is not linked to or funded by the local authority, a formal authorization is not necessarily needed. For example, in situations where a feedback loop will be led by a less formal group – such as a political faction, political party, group of local elected officials, a single elected official (such as an opposition council member), or in partnership with external stakeholders such as civil society or an international organization – only a general commitment to participate in the feedback loop process is likely sufficient.

There are risks to an incomplete feedback loop. Closing the loop means feedback is not only collected but used – and the public has a clear understanding of how. Do you have concerns about your team’s ability to complete the steps to the end and follow through with the public? Concerns may relate to staff availability, agreement among political stakeholders, or a limited budget for outreach.

Consider the following risks:

• The loop isn’t closed: The most common and most disastrous risk of implementing a feedback loop is the failure to “close the loop.” Failing to close the loop generally means that “people’s voices were solicited but not acted on.”⁴⁰ From the residents’ point of view, their feedback disappeared into a vacuum, never to be seen again and with no discernible impact on government behavior. This can have deeply negative consequences for public trust in local authorities. Residents will be less inclined to supply feedback when asked in the future. At worst, trust in local authorities or their legitimacy may evaporate, especially if feedback about critical services is ignored. In this case, residents may take service delivery into their own hands or turn to parallel governance institutions.
• Feedback is too voluminous to analyze, inaccurate or unusable: The feedback loop is closed in the sense that some action was taken to address the problem, but challenges like the personal bias of decision-making officials, lack of access to relevant information, or limited technical know-how “reduced or negated any possible positive impact.”⁴¹ Requests for input and feedback should not require specialized technical knowledge or training of the community members being approached. Input should be kept general enough that the average resident can respond based on their life experience living in the community. This puts more responsibility on the designers of the feedback loop’s data collection tools. This is a key reason why data collection should focus on setting priorities rather than on the technical aspects of a particular solution. More detailed feedback can be collected in later dialogue activities.